Configuration Status Accounting

The recording and reporting of information needed for configuration management including the status of configuration items (CIs), proposed changes and the implementation status of approved changes. Status accounting provides the means by which the current state of the development can be judged and the history of the development life cycle can be traced.

Why Configuration Status Accounting is Important

Scenario: Coding from an Out-of-date Design

A development team spends two months coding from a baselined design description that, unbeknown to them, has outstanding change requests. When the change requests are finally implemented the design is substantially different. Ten thousand lines of code have to be re-worked.

This loss could have been avoided if the configuration status of the design description was known to the software developers.